The development of the electronic technology and the information technology improves the popularity of computer games. More particularly, as the speed of the central processing unit (CPU) is improved and the wait of the Internet on-line process is reduced, the on-line computer game blossoms into one of most popular games in this century. The greatest charm of the on-line computer game is the interaction with other players other than the single player operation.
In general, when a user initiates the game program on a personal computer, keys of the keyboard are configured to serve as hot keys of the game. However, different computer games usually have different operating actions and hot key settings. Hot keys are generally in a large number and incompatible for different games. Therefore, it is inconvenient for the user to memorize and operate all hot keys corresponding to different games. Furthermore, when the computer game is an on-line computer game for more than one player, the keyboard must not only serve as a hot key input device to input computer game operating actions, but also a standard keyboard to input standard characters for player interactions. Therefore, how to improve the speed of switching the functions of keys, which can selectively input computer game operating actions and standard characters, is another issue of playing on-line computer games.
Moreover, the hot key configured to input a computer game operating action is usually a combination of keys. For example, two or more than two keys are generally activated at the same time to input one computer game operating action. Therefore, the player has difficulties not only in memorizing every hot key, but also in operating multiple keys at the same time. Furthermore, the hot keys corresponding to different computer-game operating actions are usually randomly disposed in different areas of the keyboard, which reduces the flexibility and convenience of operation.
Therefore, there is a desire to provide an input apparatus and a method for configuring a key to correspond to a computer game operating action to resolve the problems of prior arts.